Historical Background
Part I: Guelphs and Ghibellines
In the Middle Ages, much of Western Europe was dominated by two great political forces: the Holy Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Church. The Empire, which purported to be the continuation of the old Roman Empire after a centuries-long interregnum, was now centered in Germany rather than Rome; though emperors were crowned by the pope, they first had to be elected “King of the Romans” by the German nobility. But the high aim of the Empire was to restore the universal monarchy of Rome and unite the world in peace under a single rule of law.
The Church, although ostensibly aloof from temporal affairs, was of course heavily invested in the world. The pope only supported an emperor insofar as he furthered the interests of the Church; emperors who threatened to encroach on those interests faced hostile resistance from the Church and its allies. By the thirteenth century, the goal of the papacy became to support the independence of the powerful city-states of northern Italy as a buffer against imperial invasion by land, while maintaining a grip on its feudal territories in the south.
The independent cities of northern Italy were aligned with church or empire as a matter of convenience and local politics. One city might side with the pope if its rival sided with the emperor. Likewise, within the cities, individual families took sides according to tradition, feuds, and private interest. The party of the emperor adopted the name “Ghibelline” after Weiblingen, a German castle whose name had become a battle cry of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, the royal line of Frederick II (Roman Emperor, 1220-1250). The party of the pope adopted the name “Guelph” after the House of Welf, the German family of Otto IV (Roman Emperor, 1209-1215) and the only serious contenders against the Hohenstaufens for the imperial throne. In fact, the brief reign of Otto IV, who was the first and last Welf emperor, had interrupted an otherwise unbroken line of Hohenstaufen emperors.
But the two parties of northern Italy were far removed from the German noble houses from which they had taken their names. The Ghibellines supported not so much the man Frederick II, but the ideal of the Roman Empire; and the Guelphs did not favor the House of Welf as much as they opposed the Roman Empire and the Hohenstaufens who controlled it. The Ghibelline cause was championed by old families of landed nobility, who sought to reinforce their traditional feudal power by the authority of an emperor and the hierarchical order of a universal empire centered in Italy. The Guelphs were the party of the people, headed by newly rich banking and mercantile families, whose alliance with the pope protected the independence and self-government of their cities. The political and ideological differences between these parties were not merely academic: they fueled and were fueled by wars between neighboring cities, blood feuds between neighboring families, and murderous grudges between individuals.
The Assassination of Buondelmonte
1215
In Florence, the Guelph and Ghibelline parties were first introduced in 1215. In that year, a nobleman named Buondelmonte dei Buondelmonti had promised to marry a young woman from the Amidei family, but he abruptly broke off the engagement to marry a daughter of the Donati family instead. Outraged, the Amidei girl’s uncle, Oderigo (or Oddo Arrigo) Fifanti, called together his friends and relatives from several of the noble families of Florence, including the girl’s father Lambertuccio, the powerful Uberti family, the Lamberti family, and the counts of Gangalandi. They all agreed that the girl had been humiliated and that Buondelmonte should suffer an equal shame. Some of them suggested he should be beaten. Someone said they should disfigure him by cutting his face. But it was Mosca, a nobleman of the Lamberti family, who spoke the fateful and infamous words: “A thing done has an end.” Cosa fatta capo ha. With this, everyone understood that he must be killed.
So on Easter Sunday, the day of Buondelmonte’s wedding with the Donati girl, they assembled at the Amidei house at the foot of the Ponte Vecchio (the “Old Bridge” across the River Arno) and waited for the groom to ride across the bridge with his new bride. Buondelmonte approached gallantly, decked all in white on a white horse, and the men fanned out into the path to block his way. There, under the pagan statue of Mars which in those days stood at the foot of the bridge, Schiatta of the Uberti family forcibly dragged him from his horse, Mosca and Lambertuccio beat him on the ground, and Oderigo cut his throat.
The assassins fled, and the city of Florence was left in turmoil. The wedding procession became a funeral procession, parading Buondelmonte’s body throughout the city on a bier. His bride sat beside him with his head in her lap, weeping publicly for all to see. That day, the names of the Guelph and Ghibelline parties were brought into Florence for the first time. The great families of the Florentine nobility aligned themselves against each other—either with the Buondelmonti family and the Guelphs, or with the Uberti and the Ghibellines. This was the seed of factional strife and civil upheaval that would plague Florence long into the future. Oderigo’s personal pride escalated an insult to a grudge; familial pride escalated the grudge to a feud; and partisan pride escalated the feud to civil conflict.
In Canto 6 of the Inferno, when Dante speaks with the glutton Ciacco (the first of many fellow Florentines he will encounter in Hell), he inquires about the fates of several famous men from Florence, including Mosca and Oderigo (whom he calls Arrigo; not all critics are convinced the same man is intended). Ciacco responds, “They are among the blacker souls” (6.85). Indeed Dante does see Mosca farther down in the pit, among the sowers of schism in Inferno 28. Oderigo (Arrigo) is never mentioned again (whether the poet forgot about him or intentionally left him out is unknown), but we may imagine he is in the same place as Mosca for pitting the families of Florence against one another to settle his differences with Buondelmonte.
Despite their bloody origins, the Guelphs and Ghibellines of Florence coexisted more or less peacefully over the next thirty years. Though one side favored the pope and one the emperor, both shared a genuine interest in the good of the commonwealth. But Emperor Frederick II, who continued to expand his power as well as the borders of the Holy Roman Empire, would eventually use his influence with the Ghibelline party to amplify the partisan conflict in Florence.
Stupor Mundi
1194-1220
Frederick II, called “Stupor Mundi” (“Wonder of the World”) by his contemporaries, was the last and most ambitious of the Hohenstaufen emperors. He was born the day after Christmas in 1194, the son of Emperor Henry VI and the Sicilian Queen Constance, both of whom were dead before his fourth birthday. He grew up under the guardianship of Pope Innocent III; and his tutor, Cencio Savelli, would later succeed Innocent as Pope Honorius III. Crowned King of Sicily at the age of three, he began to consolidate his power in Sicily and southern Italy when he was only thirteen.
Frederick’s close relationships with the popes meant that he enjoyed papal support in his early years. Although Innocent III had crowned Otto IV (the first and only Welf emperor) in 1209, they soon clashed and Innocent put his full backing behind Frederick instead. With Innocent as a sponsor, Frederick was elected King of the Romans in 1215, the same year Otto was deposed (and the same year Buondelmonte was assassinated in Florence). By November 1220, a month before his twenty-sixth birthday, he was crowned Emperor of Rome by Honorius III.
1221-1248
As emperor, Frederick began to antagonize the papacy. First, he failed to honor his promise to join the Fifth Crusade, which led to the loss of Damietta in 1221. Later, after annexing Jerusalem via political maneuvering and an advantageous marriage, he embarked to join the Sixth Crusade, but returned to southern Italy after falling ill before reaching the destination. For this, he was excommunicated by the new pope, Gregory IX, in 1227. He finally made it to the Holy Land the following year, but as an excommunicate he no longer had the authority to go on crusade—in response, Gregory excommunicated him a second time for good measure. Despite all this, Frederick brokered a deal with the sultan to restore Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Bethlehem to Christian control with virtually no bloodshed. He crowned himself King of Jerusalem in 1229. Thus, Frederick had peacefully and successfully concluded the Sixth Crusade, but not without incurring the wrath of Pope Gregory IX and the Holy Church. He battled Gregory’s forces in southern Italy for a year before they came to a truce in a face-to-face meeting.
In 1235, Frederick went to Germany to suppress his own son Henry’s revolt against him. While there, he struck an agreement with Otto the Child, son of Otto IV, which finally reconciled the Welf and Hohenstaufen houses, even while the conflict between Guelphs and Ghibellines in Italy continued to intensify. He invaded Lombardy in 1237 to quell the resistance of several Guelph cities, and was excommunicated yet again by Gregory IX. Over the next four years, Frederick and Gregory struggled for control of the Italian peninsula. Frederick ravaged Guelph cities all over Italy, while rewarding Ghibelline cities with imperial privileges. He marched on Rome in 1241 and might have conquered it, had not Gregory died before the assault commenced. Frederick chose to withdraw and await the election of a new, and hopefully favorable, pope.
But the new pope, Innocent IV, proved to be even more hostile to Frederick than Gregory had been. In 1245, he branded Frederick a heretic and declared him deposed as Emperor of Rome. He launched offensives against him in Germany, Italy, and Sicily; he sent money and support to Frederick’s rivals in Germany in an effort to establish a new emperor; and he plotted to assassinate Frederick and his son Enzo. For a time, Frederick resisted these multipronged attacks from the pope; but in 1248, the emperor’s unexpected defeat at Parma (a city in Lombardy) weakened his grip on Italy. The great cities of northern and central Italy were hopelessly divided along Guelph and Ghibelline lines, caught up in the bloody back-and-forth struggle between pope and emperor.
1248-1250
It was around this time that Frederick sent messages and ambassadors to the Uberti family, who were the leaders of the Ghibellines in Florence. He promised the support of his German cavalry, if they would help to expel the Guelphs from the city. The Uberti accepted his offer, thrusting civil warfare upon their beloved city; the great noble families battled each other in the streets of every quarter of Florence. After days and nights of bloody struggle, Frederick’s horsemen arrived, and the Ghibellines finally managed to drive the Guelphs out of the city in February 1248. The new masters of Florence proceeded to topple dozens of Guelph palaces and towers. They even attempted to drop a tower onto the famous Baptistery of San Giovanni, the beautiful octagonal building where Dante Alighieri would one day be baptized; but, whether by fortune or fate, they failed, and the Baptistery is still standing today, one of the oldest surviving buildings in Florence.
Frederick’s fortunes in broader Italy were failing as well, as the Guelphs were increasingly reclaiming their lost territories. In 1249, he imprisoned and blinded his minister and close advisor, Pier della Vigna, on suspicion of treachery. It was said that Pier, who may have been innocent, killed himself by bashing his head against his cell wall (Dante speaks to Pier in Inferno 13, where he has been transformed into a great bramble among the souls of others who committed suicide). Frederick’s son Enzo was captured and imprisoned by the Guelphs a few months later, and his illegitimate son Richard was killed in battle. The emperor soon fell ill, and he died of dysentery in Apulia in December 1250, two weeks before his fifty-sixth birthday. He left the empire to his son Conrad, who died four years later and was never officially crowned; and his various kingdoms and other territories, he left to his sons Manfred and Henry. No emperor sat on the throne for more than half a century after Frederick’s death.
In the Inferno, Dante never meets Frederick II in person, but he is told that his soul is buried in a tomb among the heretics of the sixth circle (10.119). And the ghost of Frederick haunts Dante’s Hell in another sense as well: the bloodstain of his legacy in Italy marks all the sinners—the tyrants, the frauds, the traitors—who in various ways were both perpetrators and victims of the war between Guelphs and Ghibellines.
The Battle of Montaperti
1250-1251
On the very night of Frederick’s death, the podestà (governor) whom he’d installed in Florence died in his sleep when the ceiling collapsed over his bed. The people took it as a sign from God that the emperor’s power was waning; when news of his death reached Florence a few weeks later (January 1251), the people summoned the Guelphs back to the city and reconciled the two parties.
The new peace was an uneasy one. When summer arrived, the Florentine Guelphs launched an assault against neighboring Pistoia, a staunchly Ghibelline city. They came back victorious, and immediately banished several Ghibelline leaders from Florence who had been opposed to the expedition. Now in charge, the Guelphs adopted a new design for the arms of Florence: whereas the old ensign had been a white fleur-de-lis (lily) on a red field, they inverted the colors so the new one was a red fleur-de-lis on a white field. The Ghibellines kept the original colors for their party.
1258-1260
In 1258, the Uberti family and other Ghibelline leaders conspired with Manfred (son of Frederick II, and King of Sicily) to take the government of Florence back from the Guelphs. When the Guelphs discovered the plot and beheaded two of the conspirators, the Uberti and other prominent Ghibellines fled to nearby Siena, a Ghibelline city and rival of Florence. The Guelphs destroyed the palaces and towers of those who fled, and used the stones to build a new wall facing Siena.
The exiled Ghibellines appealed to Manfred for help, but he offered them only a hundred German horsemen, scarcely a tenth of what they would need to retake Florence. The Florentine exiles were insulted by the offer, but their leader Manente degli Uberti, known as “Farinata” (meaning “Floured” in Italian) because his hair was the color of flour, hatched a devious plan to elicit more reinforcements from Manfred. They accepted Manfred’s offer and brought the hundred German horsemen back to Siena, where they waited until the Guelphs of Florence marched out to lay siege to Siena in May 1260. On Farinata’s advice, the Ghibellines then prepared a feast for the Germans in Siena; they got them all drunk and proceeded to egg them on, promising double pay if they’d mount their horses for an immediate surprise attack on the Guelphs who were camped outside the city. The Germans enthusiastically obliged. They initially routed many of the unsuspecting Guelphs, but at length they were overpowered by superior numbers. Every last one of the Germans was slain, and the Guelphs returned to Florence dragging Manfred’s captured standard in the mud behind them.
Farinata’s plan worked: when Manfred heard the news, he immediately sent eight hundred more German horsemen to the Ghibelline exiles. However, Manfred stipulated that the Germans were to return after three months; so the Ghibellines, in order to make use of the borrowed cavalry, would have to somehow draw the Guelphs back out of Florence for an attack. Once again, Farinata devised a plan. He let it be known to the Guelphs that the exiles and even some of the Sienese were dissatisfied with the leadership in Siena, and that the exiles were itching to return home peacefully. Under this pretense, Farinata promised the Guelphs that, if they would assemble a force outside of Siena, a gate would be opened for them to raid the city. Some of the Guelph nobility, Tegghiaio Aldobrandi and their leader Guido Guerra the most outspoken among them, suggested they should at least wait until the German mercenaries’ three month retainer was up before accepting such a dubious offer from their exiled rivals. But the majority of the Florentines bought wholesale into Farinata’s ruse, and at length they chose to accept his offer despite the admonition of Tegghiaio and Guido Guerra. Before September, they had assembled a great army of Florentines together with their Guelph allies from all over Tuscany; and they marched on the fourth of September from Florence to Montaperti, a place on the River Arbia just east of Siena, to follow through with Farinata’s proposal. All told, some three thousand horsemen and thirty thousand foot soldiers had assembled on the Guelph side.
The Guelphs watched the gate open, just as Farinata had promised; but they grew more and more alarmed as they saw the German mercenaries marching from the gate, followed by an army of battle-ready Florentine exiles and the Sienese with their Ghibelline allies from all over Tuscany. Even worse, groups of men on the Guelph side began to desert their own ranks to join their enemies. These traitors were Ghibelline remainders who hadn’t been exiled with the rest of their party; through secret couriers, they had schemed in advance with the exiles to treasonously desert the Guelphs at the start of battle, in order to lower their morale. As the Germans charged into the Guelph cavalry, one of the traitors, Bocca degli Abati, hacked off the hand of the knight who was holding the cavalry standard.
Seeing their standard fallen, their own soldiers turning sides, and their enemies bearing down on them, the Guelphs did not stay long on the field before fleeing back to Florence. Even so, when the battle ended, some twenty-five hundred Guelphs had been slaughtered, and another fifteen hundred captured. The exiles and their allies returned triumphantly into Siena, led by the Guelph messenger riding backwards on a donkey and dragging the standard of Florence in the mud behind him—just as the Guelphs had done with Manfred’s standard.
In the Inferno, Farinata and Tegghiaio are two of the men whom Dante asks Ciacco about, who “are among the blacker souls” (6.85). He speaks to Farinata in Inferno 10, in the circle of the heretics condemned for their disbelief in the eternity of the soul (Farinata is actually the one who tells him the fate of Frederick II, who is punished in the same circle of Hell). Farinata cuts an imposing figure, rising out of a tomb from the waist up, peering around with eyebrows raised “as if he held all Hell in great derision” (10.36). During their conversation, after learning that Dante’s ancestors were Guelphs, he asks, “Why are those people so unfair, / so cruel in their decrees against all mine?” (10.83-84). In response, Dante alludes to the Battle of Montaperti, where the Ghibellines so thoroughly routed the Guelphs: “The bloodshed and the great carnage, there / at the massacre that dyed the Arbia red, / have made us fill our temple with such prayers” (10.85-87).
Dante meets Tegghiaio deeper in Hell, along with the Guelph leader Guido Guerra and another Guelph of lesser nobility named Jacopo Rusticucci. Though they are all condemned for sodomy, the guide Virgil makes it clear that they are respectable men: “You want to show some courtesy to them,” he says (Inferno 16.15). The lesser of the three, Jacopo Rusticucci, introduces them. Of Guido Guerra, Rusticucci says that “he accomplished much / in life with his good sense and with his blade” (16.38-39). Of Tegghiaio, who’d warned the Guelphs against rushing off to Montaperti, Rusticucci says “[his] voice / should have been welcome in the world above” (16.41-42). Before they depart, the honorable Guelphs implore Dante to tell the world about them: “Make sure to tell the people who we are” (16.85).
Deeper still in Hell, in the final circle where the floor is a lake of ice, Dante happens to kick the head of a sinner frozen in the ice beneath his feet. It turns out to be the soul of Bocca degli Abati, condemned for his treachery at Montaperti. “Why do you tread / on me?” the sinner asks. “If not so the vengeance may increase / for Montaperti, why abuse the dead?” (Inferno 32.79-81). Dante attempts to learn his identity by appealing to his desire for fame: “If it is fame you ask / [then] I can put your name among my sheets” (32.92-93). But Bocca, perhaps ashamed of his sin, does not oblige: “I want the opposite of that,” he says, and tells Dante to leave (32.94). Dante only hears Bocca’s name because another sinner in the ice blurts it out; Bocca names the other sinner as payback, and proceeds to rat out a list of traitors condemned to the same circle. Whereas Farinata was almost proud to be in Hell, and Tegghiaio and Guido Guerra wanted Dante to remember their lives on earth, Bocca wishes to be forgotten entirely.
The principal actors at Montaperti came from the generation in Florence before Dante. He would have grown up hearing stories of their deeds—the scheming, the valor, the treachery. They would have loomed just as large in Dante’s mind as the great characters of classical literature. Farinata was a Ulysses, cunning and proud; Tegghiaio a Cassandra, prophetic and unheeded; Bocca an Antenor, traitor to his people. And like their classical counterparts, the best and the worst of them all ended up in Hell.
The Decline and Fall of the Ghibelline Party
1260-1263
After Montaperti, the Florentine Guelphs did not hesitate to abandon their city and flee to their allies in Lucca. The former exiles, along with their Ghibelline allies and Manfred’s German cavalry, rode into Florence unopposed. They installed a new podestà, Guido Novello of the Conti Guidi family (not the same Guido Novello who hosted Dante in his final years). Now every city in Tuscany, except Lucca, was controlled by the Ghibellines.
Shortly thereafter, representatives from the Ghibelline cities held a congress at Empoli, a city on the River Arno about fifteen miles west of Florence, to solidify their alliance and discuss how best to move forward. In the meeting, the Pisans and Sienese proposed that Florence should be razed to the ground—the only way, as they saw it, to be rid of their Florentine foes for good. The proposal was almost unanimously accepted by the members of the congress; Farinata alone stood in opposition to it. With unbending will, he declared that he would defend Florence with his own sword if he had to; and eventually, the others capitulated to his will and agreed that Florence should be left standing. Thus Farinata single-handedly saved his city from destruction. When Dante speaks to him in Hell, Farinata reminds him of this fact, partly in an attempt to excuse himself for the carnage at Montaperti: “But there I was alone, where each of them / elected that we do away with Florence— / one with an open face in its defense” (Inferno 10.91-93).
Inevitably, the Tuscan Ghibellines set their sights on Lucca next. In 1263, the Guelphs remaining in Lucca were forced to flee yet again, this time across the Apennine mountains to Bologna, leaving all of Tuscany in Ghibelline hands. But the Ghibellines’ advantage would not last long.
1265-1266
When Pope Clement IV was elected in February 1265, he urged Charles of Anjou (the youngest brother of King Louis IX of France) to come to Italy and help him defeat Manfred and the Ghibellines. In return, he offered to crown him King of Sicily in Manfred’s place. Charles accepted, and by springtime he rode into Italy with his French army. Manfred had prepared for such an invasion by posting some three thousand German and Lombard knights to guard the passes in Lombardy. But Buoso da Duera, the Ghibelline lord of Cremona (a Lombard city), accepted a bribe to betray Manfred; he somehow arranged it so Charles’ army made it all the way through Lombardy without lifting a sword. For this, Dante finds Buoso deep in Hell among the traitors—it is Buoso who blurts out the name of Bocca degli Abati, who identifies him in turn: “Here he weeps for the French silver,” says Bocca (Inferno 32.115).
Charles of Anjou reached Rome, and the Pope crowned him King of Sicily and Naples (Apulia) in January 1266 (in the Middle Ages, Apulia included all of southern Italy, not just the heel and spur of Italy’s “boot” comprising the modern region of Apulia; modern historians refer to the medieval kingdom as the Kingdom of Naples). He immediately marched his army southeast to engage Manfred. Manfred ordered two of his counts to guard a bridge across the Liri River in the town of Ceprano, a choke point where Charles’ forces could easily have been stopped or slowed; but the counts, whether by fear or treachery, allowed Charles to cross the bridge without any resistance. Thus Dante mentions “Ceprano, where all Apulians marched / as traitors” (Inferno 28.16-17).
The French army then continued southeast until, on February 26, 1266, it met Manfred’s main force near Benevento (a town thirty miles northeast of Naples). The Tuscan Guelphs under Guido Guerra were also marching with Charles and his French army; and when Manfred saw them on the battlefied, he reportedly said, “And where are the Ghibellines I’ve done so much for?” Manfred’s German cavalry and Saracen archers fought honorably, despite being outnumbered; but his Apulian barons again betrayed him, fleeing the battlefield when he ordered them to charge. Manfred himself did not flee, but fought to his bitter end.
Manfred’s death marked the beginning of the end for the Ghibelline party in Tuscany. The exiled Florentine Guelphs, fresh from the Battle of Benevento, immediately began plotting their return to Florence. They were generally supported by the city’s commoners (called the popolo, the “people”), given their losses against the Ghibellines at Montaperti and the heavy-handed rule of Count Guido Novello and the Ghibellines.
1266-1267
The Florentines restructured the government in an attempt to relieve the partisan tensions. When Guido Novello’s term was up, they elected not one, but two podestà in his place for the first time in the republic’s history—one, Catalano, was a Guelph; and the other, Loderingo, was a Ghibelline. They also appointed thirty-six men, from both parties and various walks of life, to advise the two podestà and make new ordinances for the city. Among other things, the thirty-six established the seven guilds for the city’s artisans: judges and notaries; cloth merchants; money changers; wool workers; physicians and apothecaries; silk workers and mercers; and furriers. In time, membership in one of the seven guilds would become a prerequisite to holding political office, effectively transferring power from the old nobility (primarily Ghibellines) to the merchants and artisans (primarily Guelphs).
Catalano and Loderingo, being from opposite parties, were ostensibly chosen to mediate a peace between the Guelphs and Ghibellines of Florence; they had already done so just a year earlier in their hometown of Bologna, where they had likewise held joint office as podestà. But the two were knights and founding members of the Order of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a religious brotherhood popularly known as the “Jovial Friars” due to their lax rules; in this capacity, they had sworn fealty to the pope regardless of their political affiliations. And indeed, they stood by while the thirty-six enacted ordinance after ordinance in favor of the Guelphs, and the people grew more and more anxious with the Ghibelline presence in their city.
The Ghibellines, led by the Uberti and Lamberti families, felt threatened by the Guelph favoritism of those in office. In November 1266, they mustered in Florence some fifteen hundred horsemen, comprising their Tuscan allies and German mercenaries with Count Guido Novello in charge; and they demanded the dismissal of the thirty-six. The people rose up against them in response, barricading themselves in the palaces and towers, while firing upon the horsemen with crossbows. The two podestà offered amnesty to Count Guido if he would only return quietly to his house; but the count, feeling cornered, fled with the horsemen to nearby Prato instead. They attempted to return to Florence the following morning, but the people denied them admission and sent them back to Prato.
The two podestà did nothing to prevent the Guelph uprising, which would ultimately result in the destruction of the houses of the prominent Ghibelline families. The area of Florence known as Gardingo, where the Uberti had built their houses among ancient ruins, was made a ruin once again. In the Inferno, Dante meets Catalano and Loderingo among the hypocrites—either because they were Jovial Friars, a notoriously hypocritical religious order; or because they favored the Guelphs in Florence despite their show of bipartisanship. “[We] were chosen by your land to keep the peace,” Catalano tells Dante, “and how we governed that place / is still apparent now around Gardingo” (23.104-108).
At any rate, the two podestà were eventually dismissed and replaced with a single podestà once again. In January 1267, the Guelphs and Ghibellines of Florence called for a truce. Both parties again were allowed to live in the city, and to reinforce the truce, a number of marriages were arranged between families of opposite parties (among the marriages, Guido Cavalcanti, who would later become Dante’s best friend, was betrothed to Farinata’s daughter at the age of eight or nine—ironically, her name was Beatrice). Meanwhile, the Guelphs secretly sent word to Charles of Anjou requesting troops. In response, King Charles sent eight hundred French horsemen to Florence under the command of Guy de Montfort (Dante sees Guy in the seventh circle of Hell among the murderers, where he is condemned for a later crime; Inferno 12.118-120). The Ghibellines, catching wind of the scheme, departed the city just before Guy de Montfort’s arrival on Easter Sunday, 1267—fifty-two years after Buondelmonte’s murder on Easter Sunday, 1215. The Ghibellines never returned to Florence.
1268
Around the same time, the Ghibellines were likewise driven from most of the cities in Tuscany; only the strongholds of Pisa and Siena remained to them. In August 1268, Charles’ army engaged the forces of Manfred’s nephew, Conradin, on the Palentine Plains just east of Tagliacozzo. Charles won the battle by a strategy suggested to him by Érard de Vallery, a French knight who was passing through Italy on his way home from the Holy Land. On Érard’s advice, Charles held back a reserve of elite warriors while Conradin’s army decimated his main force. When the fighting stopped, Conradin’s men broke formation to loot the dead and pursue those who had fled. Charles then ordered his reserves to charge, and they easily routed the disorganized and battle-weary remnants of Conradin’s army. Thus Dante writes, “Tagliacozzo, where / the old Érard had conquered without arms,” because Érard won the battle with his counsel alone (Inferno 28.17-18).
Shortly after the Battle of Tagliacozzo, Conradin was captured, and Charles of Anjou had him publicly beheaded—ending, once and for all, the Hohenstaufen line that had once dominated most of Western Europe; and with it, any hopes of restoration the Ghibellines might have had. The party of the Empire never recovered. In two decades’ time, they would be all but eradicated from Tuscany in the Battle of Campaldino—where a young Guelph named Dante Alighieri would play his part.